A Space Series That Rings True

May 8, 1985|By Noel Holston, Sentinel Television Critic

CBS' mattress-minded miniseries Space not only failed to get off the ground, it rarely got out of bed. But if you were among the millions of viewers whom Space lost during its five-night run, don't hold the bad experience against PBS' Spaceflight, let alone confuse the two.

Spaceflight is not Space, nor is it The Right Stuff. It is, simply, the real thing, a non-fiction miniseries that takes full advantage of the Space Age's overlapping of the age of film and video. It finds so much drama, political intrigue, action, humor and interesting information in the vast visual record of the U.S. and Soviet space programs that it makes you wonder why anyone bothered with re-enactments or fictionalizations -- and why someone didn't think of it sooner.

Blaine Baggett still wonders.''I couldn't believe something as important and as fascinating to America -- and to the world, really -- had never been looked at in a comprehensive way,'' Spaceflight's 33-year-old executive producer said in a telephone interview from Washington. ''We always cover these events mission by mission, but no one's ever stepped back and said, 'Well, what's the real meaning of all this?' ''

Spaceflight, which begins its four-week run on PBS tonight at 8, may not completely answer that question, but it does an impressive job of giving political and historical context to events it recalls with pithy narration (by actor Martin Sheen) and often remarkable film footage.

Tonight's program ranges from the earliest rocketry experiments to the formation of NASA and the selection of the Mercury astronauts. The May 15 show covers the early manned flights of both the United States and the Soviet Union. The May 22 program re-examines American efforts to put men on the moon. The May 29 installment is devoted to the space shuttle program and the militarization and commercial possibilities of space.

Each of the four hours is rewarding, but the first and last hold more surprises.

The Soviet Union's world-stunning launch of Sputnik in October 1957 begins tonight's program, ''Thunder in the Skies,'' which quickly backpedals to 1883, when mathematican Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, now known as ''the father of Russian cosmonautics,'' already is anticipating many of the problems that astronauts eventually will encounter in space. Another pioneer, American Robert Goddard, is shown launching the world's first liquid-fueled rocket from a Massachusetts farm in 1926.

In Germany, meanwhile, rocketry was becoming a national fad, like drag- racing for eggheads. Spaceflight shows how the brightest of these German Tom Swifts, including a young man named Wernher von Braun, were grabbed up by the Nazis and put to work developing rockets as weaponry.

This sequence includes movie-quality color footage of the German rocket scientists testing in 1942 what would two years later become the terror of England, the V-2 rocket. The first two exploded on the launch pad. The third soared like a fiery sword.

Although there are some instances in Spaceflight in which actual events are ''represented'' by ''similar archival footage,'' the amazing film of the V-2 tests is real.

''I found it in a vault in the Norton Air Force depository out in San Bernadino, California,'' said Baggett, who added that as far as he knows, it has never been seen publicly in this country.

White-haired Krafft Ericke, who was present when that first V-2 went up, tells Baggett that he and the other German rocket scientists ''felt like Columbus or Magellan when they for the first time saw entire new worlds and knew the world would never be the same again. . . . We knew that the Space Age had begun.''

Later on, Ericke, who after World War II came over with the Von Braun group to develop rockets for the United States, hilariously recounts the story of how one of the V-2's they launched from New Mexico went off course and hit a cemetery in Tijuana.

From Von Braun's rocket tests, Spaceflight's focus shifts to what is now Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., where test pilot Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier in the X-1 rocket-plane and, in that instant, renders the world's largest air force obsolete. Already top secret, the work of Yeager, Scott Crossfield and other Edwards test pilots becomes back burner as well in 1957 when the Russians launch Sputnik and the United States shifts its priorities to what eventually becomes the Mercury astronaut program.

Because the news media, with NASA's blessing and help, made such celebrities of the first two groups of astronauts, Spaceflight's middle episodes involve more familiar footage and faces. Still, there are revelations, particularly the Soviet space footage slipped to Baggett by a Russian diplomat.